Our release date stuff

Just a reminder folks, we don’t give out release dates.

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on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 3:31 AM by Chris Forscythe and is filed under Uncategorized.
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22 Responses to “Our release date stuff”

Which is quite understandable, considering that you are all volunteers. Since you are writing Adium for fun, and not out of any obligation, why should you settle on any particular release date? It might as well be ready as it might not, right?

I don’t agree with that. Keeping timelines and giving tentative release dates of new versions keeps people interested in the project.That way the end users have something to look forward to. After all, don’t you want to have as many people as possible using your software?Open source software can also benefit from marketing (take a look at Firefox) and that’s pretty much what release dates are…

I can totally understand why people want and ask for release dates. It’s in our nature, sort of. But I can also totally understand why it’s so difficult to have any sort of release dates in these kind of project, it just doesn’t work that way.

laurent: We’re not opposed to release dates in principle, and I agree that timelines and release dates are good for keeping folks interested and excited. We’re opposed to them for Adium at this point, though, because we depend on the dynamic schedules of a relatively small group of people. Adium 1.0 has been in progress for a year and several months at this point; too much has changed for us to be willing to be cavalier with testing and releasing.

laurent: Firefox is actually a rather bad comparison, since it has several people working full-time on it. Most large open source projects do, and I suspect that Gaim and Adium are rather large considering that they don’t. It’s an awful lot easier to make a commitment if you’re paid to do so…

My bad… I thought that at least a few people worked on Adium fulltime. I guess you guys deserve even more gratitude then. I wish I knew something about OSX software development to help out with Adium, unfortunately I don’t…

well andre, i use this address always for new beta-s, but this time, i asked for a backup address, or a mirror for the newest beta..so i can log in to my msn, before the trac come alive again.. (witch probably not today or tomorrow..)

But at the same time, I feel that a year and a half between version updates is… well… Microsoft-esque. Especially since Adium used to be updated every few months.

I don’t mean to criticize, because I love Adium, but perhaps you guys are biting off a bit too much for 1.0? By that I mean: the betas have been great and I enjoy the new features. Perhaps you should make the current beta feature-complete for 1.0, stamp out bugs, and then release it. Save any new features you’re currently working on for version 1.1.

The reason I suggest that is because, honestly, if Leopard were out today, I’d see no compelling reason to choose Adium 0.89.1 over iChat.

You should think about getting 1.0 out the door before Leopard hits the stores.